MAGAZINE
The chain of hands — the summer Gironde held together
We always photograph the same image: the helmeted silhouette before the orange wall. It is true, and it is incomplete. Behind that firefighter, that summer, there was a farmer filling his water tanker for the sixth time, a town hall secretary looking for the number of an eighty-nine-year-old woman, a volunteer unfolding camp beds in a gym at midnight, and a stranger who wrote “I have two rooms” in a village group. This is the chain we would like to talk about.
The firefighters: four out of five were not required to go
Let’s start with them anyway, since everything converges on them. In the Var, the fire that broke out on July 22 on the heights above Pontevès burned nearly 2 500 hectares; around 1 200 firefighters took turns day and night, while some 400 residents of Pontevès and Barjols left with a bag in hand. In Gironde, a few days later, FR-Alert had to be triggered to order evacuations, nearly fourteen flare-ups had to be fought on Tuesday alone, and more than one hundred and twenty kilometres of firebreaks cut in twenty-four hours — before residents of Le Haillan, Mérignac and Eysines could return home.
What fewer people know is who wears these uniforms. In France, the vast majority of firefighters are volunteers: they have another job, another life, and they leave when their pager goes off. The nurse finishing her shift, the carpenter leaving a worksite, the student putting off her revision. They train in the evenings, take courses on weekends, and on the day of the fire they are there, just like the professionals, facing the same risks, without anyone having required them to be.
The cost has been terrible. Since the start of July, four firefighters have died in France: a young volunteer in Savoie on July 8, two of our own in Gironde on July 21 facing the fire near Bordeaux-Mérignac airport, and, on the night of July 27 to 28, Corporal Laurent Manson, thirty-eight, a volunteer, in Bouches-du-Rhône. Eighty-eight others emerged injured from these fires. We write their names and their numbers because a tribute without numbers quickly becomes a figure of speech, and because their families do not count in hectares.
Farmers and winegrowers: the first help, often the fastest
In the burning countryside, help arrives before the reinforcements because it already lives there. It is the farmers and winegrowers. They have what firefighters always lack in the first fifteen minutes: water — water tankers, treatment tanks, farm cisterns —, machinery capable of opening a strip of bare earth where the fire might stop, and above all, a knowledge of the land no map can provide: where the track that no longer appears in the land registry runs, which gate opens onto the back plot, where the buried cistern has been waiting for twenty years.
Many worked all night alongside the professionals, under coordination, with that very rural blend of calm and stubbornness. And many, on returning, looked at what remained of their own work: scorched rows of vines, lost beehives, fences to rebuild, hectares only half-insured, equipment that was not simply property but a tool of the trade—in other words, a livelihood for tomorrow. They saved the neighbour’s house before their own, and they won’t tell anyone about it.
Elected officials and municipal staff: the night a town hall becomes a command post
A village mayor has no crisis unit. They have a phone, a gym key, and the list—the list of elderly people, those living alone, those on oxygen, those without a car, read again at three in the morning with a prayer that no one has been forgotten. This summer, in threatened communities, they and their staff opened community halls, lined up tables, found blankets, kept reception registers, reassured a family that did not speak French, and called a livestock farmer to say their animals could come.
They also did the most thankless thing in the job: telling someone who refuses to leave their home, “You have to go now”—and staying polite, staying firm, and coming back. To elected officials, town hall secretaries, technical staff, municipal police: to those whose names will not appear in any statement, these lines say we saw their light still on.
Associations: the logistics of comfort
When hundreds of people arrive at a gym in the night, you need someone who already knows how it’s done. That is the work of approved civil protection associations—the French Red Cross, Protection Civile, rescue and first aid volunteers and their local equivalents—and the major solidarity associations that join them: welcoming people, settling them in, distributing water and meals, setting up a first aid station, watching over vulnerable people, listening to those who break down at two in the morning. They also provide what is never seen: support for responders themselves, psychological help afterward, restoration, paperwork.
Alongside them are the municipal civil protection reserves—residents trained and committed in advance through their town hall—and animal protection associations, which evacuate horses, frightened cats, and farm animals, because for many families an animal is not a detail: it is a member of the household they refused to abandon. All these people wear a vest and not a helmet, and they do not measure their evening in hours.
And the anonymous people, who asked no one’s permission
Then there is what fits into no organisation. The neighbour who reels out three hundred metres of garden hose. The baker who brings pastries to the fire station at five in the morning. The woman who takes in two children so their parents can empty a house. The person who washes uniforms, the one who brings phone chargers, the one who opens their holiday cottage for free in the middle of high season, those who leave food bowls for dogs taken in as an emergency, the village groups where someone simply wrote: “I have two rooms, let me know.”
This part cannot be quantified or planned, and it is precisely what makes a disaster livable. It has an old-fashioned name that has never been more apt: solidarity.
What this chain teaches us
One thing deserves to be said with gravity: as we publish, no resident has been killed by the flames, neither in the Var nor in Gironde. Homes burned, tools of the trade were lost—but the evacuations fulfilled their promise. This is not luck. It is the exact result of some people’s courage and others’ discipline: warnings taken seriously, departures accepted in time, instructions followed. The only deaths this summer were men protecting others, and that alone tells the whole story of our debt.
The second lesson is harsher. A chain this beautiful should not have to make up for what was not prepared. Clear brush around homes—it is a legal obligation and, first and foremost, protection. Join your town’s municipal reserve if you have the time and energy. Train in life-saving skills. Give fire services the means to face a season that keeps growing longer. And honour the climate commitment, because every tenth of a degree avoided means summers that are a little less flammable for those who come after us.
How to really help
Do not go to the affected area: one sightseer's vehicle on a narrow road can stop a water tanker from moving. Give money to an approved association rather than unrequested items—the sorting costs volunteer hours. Get involved in advance: municipal reserve, volunteer firefighter, association volunteer; you prepare in February, not on the day of the fire. Check your insurance and brush-clearance obligations. And if you can do none of those things: provide a place to stay, feed people, watch the children, listen—the chain starts there.
To everyone who held a hose, a steering wheel, a gym key, or a hand this summer: thank you. The word is small; what you carried was not.
— The Terondo editorial team, at Audrey’s request